[ It's much easier to see once the liquid has drained some, but look, over there: lying at the bottom near the center of the pod-pool seems to be a figure, blending mostly into the blues of the room's lighting, rather like a strange stone statue. Weird. Why does it look like it's reaching for the ceiling? Maybe it's an Outsider who hasn't woken up fully, having sunk to the bottom of the pool like, well, a rock.

Or maybe it's just a poorly-placed obstacle on which you stub your toe in this over-crowded sauce bowl. Oh, god, is that a rock in this weird science pool? Oh god, was that a sea urchin you just stepped on!? Try not to get dragged under: the thing under the surface is beginning to thrash. ]

[ With most of the unpleasantness of his last few, first hours put firmly behind him, Zelgadis has taken to wandering the run-down halls of this 'base' to gain himself a better idea of the layout. The personal quarters and communal baths raise possibilities he doesn't want to juggle just yet, so he leaves them be with only a cursory glance down their respective corridors before hurrying along.

And hurry Zel does, quick on cloth-wrapped feet as he darts across doorways and halls, loathe to let himself be seen before he finds a small haven in which to hide, a bastion of silence(?) away from the curious mass of Outsiders: the library, or what stood for one in this place.

Too relieved to give the place a proper inspection, he fetches up against a wall to catch his breath, only to sigh with greater annoyance before he sets to trying to extricate the back of his head out of the old, thin wood of the wall paneling. Is... is he stuck? How!? ]

[ Help out, the voice said. Pitch in and help the local civilians. That was all well and good, but the problem was with the 'civilian' part of the equation and the fact that since he'd awoken, Zel had only really been able to find an old haori to drape over his head in a sad attempt at a hood. How was he to go and be a "good Samaritan" like this?

Easily: he wasn't. Talking to the people of the area, that was business best handled by folks who weren't him. Now fishing? Grab a pole, dig up some bait on the way, easy. It lets him get away from the bustle of the base, lets him poke and prod his way through the information pouring out of the thing behind his eyes while he walks; text and pictures and maps scroll across his field of vision like gauze, filling up the space while never quite obscuring the cracked grey road underfoot or the alien landscape surrounding him.

What an odd figure Zel makes for, out here in the ragged remains of Osaka Bay: swathed from head to toe in cloth buckled down by a sword and sheathe of considerably greater grade, he perches on the end of a dilapidated dock, staring out at sea while his line bobs peacefully and largely-forgotten in the water. ]

[ None of this, see, none of this is Zelgadis' circus and none of these people are his monkeys, but the stipend he's received for existing thus far isn't going to get him very far in this world and he knows it. So he volunteers to go out to Awaji, even if it means having to rub elbows with these strange folk.

Maybe it's on the ferry you bump into a very immovable elbow, itself attached to a very odd guy done up like a shady merchant of olde, with nothing showing but his strange eyes and flashes of his hands when they aren't tucked away in his swathes of cloth.

Or maybe it's on Awaji Island itself. Look: there's one of the new Outsiders, approaching the old Honpukuji Water Temple ruins with sword drawn. A stray puppet clatters on the pathway before him like a gatekeep, moth-eaten sode swaying in its unnerving dance. This would be a good time, perhaps, to lend a hand, or it would be if he wasn't so impatient; look, there he goes, closing the distance between himself and this odd adversary to slice the thing in twain. It's like slicing reeds, it's like breaking a paper doll, it comes apart under his blade with such an ease he would have laughed if he weren't so busy staring intently at the swarm that flows out of the desiccated remnants. The swarm that surges toward him.

Yet, somehow, it's you he turns to with a hand raised in warning, barking a short: ]

Get back! They'll come right for you!

[ The way Zelgadis sees it, the more of these tasks he takes from LILITH, the more he gains in the long run. So here he is, on a late afternoon patrol around the mountain with a handful of others, trying his best to keep attention on their surroundings rather than himself. Normally, this is a harder task than it sounds like when it comes to strangers, and that bossy pink guy seems harder to get through to than most.

It's probably why he's strayed away from the patrol troupe to approach the Rift himself. Something of this scale manifesting in the physical world like this, how could he not be interested in it? The power of it is palpable, it rolls off the thing in waves that conjure an ache in his skull that throbs in time with his pulse, it squeezes his organs like a fist inside his ribs. This thing, they said, this thing appeared in the wake of a great kaiju's destruction, like a doorway ripped into the fabric of the world. This thing was the very reason he was here.

Zelgadis, boldly and more than a little worryingly, steps closer to the Rift with hands held out, palms down, and he begins to speak a weird little ditty while a weird little light starts to gather around his fingers: ]

Dwelling within the eternal and the infinite,
source of all souls,
everlasting flame of blue--